From local conflict to national issue: when and how environmental campaigns succeed in transcending the local

Abstract

As power is increasingly removed from local to national and global arenas, local environmental activists struggle both to secure local redress of their grievances and to place their concerns on supra-local agendas. Yet some succeed in doing so. In order to elucidate the conditions that facilitate such successes, campaigns concerning three issues – road-building, waste incineration and airport expansion – are examined. In each, local campaigners in England have, at least briefly, achieved national attention. Local campaigns are most likely to succeed in elevating their concerns to the status of national issues where they frame those concerns as translocal issues by networking with others with similar grievances. They are most likely to do this with the assistance of non-local actors such as national environmental non-governmental organisations, assistance that is most likely to be provided where the issue concerns a problematic government policy, and to be sustained only so long as that issue is nationally salient and consistent with the campaign priorities of those organisations. The rise of climate change as the ‘master frame’ of environmentalism has had diverse implications for local campaigns.

Keywords:

• local campaigns
• environmental NGOs
• networks
• issue framing
• climate change
• NIMBY
• scale shift

Acknowledgements

I thank Derek Bell, Maria Kousis, John Krinsky, Stephan Price and John Stewart for helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

1. These tactics/strategies correspond to what McAdam et al. (2001) label the ‘mechanisms’ of frame bridging, relational diffusion and brokerage.

2. Richardson (2000) suggests that the Thatcher government (1979–1990) destablised this pattern. Similarly, Dryzek et al. (2003) argue that it was ‘actively exclusive’ of environmentalism, but as far as mainstream environmentalism was concerned, this appears to have been true principally of the high point of its ideological market liberalism (1986–1989) and of only certain areas of environmental policy (notably roads). Dryzek et al. (2003, p. 54) concede that the Thatcher government and its successors were actively accommodative/‘passively inclusive’ of moderate environmental NGOs from 1988, but claim that the price of environmental NGOs' inclusion was their professionalisation (Dryzek et al. 2003, p.86).

3. The aggregated numbers of members or financial supporters of the various environmental NGOs exceed 5 million (Rootes 2009c).

4. Tripods are three-legged structures, usually consisting of long scaffolding poles fastened together; stable as long as all three legs are in place, they collapse if one leg is removed. A protester suspended from a tripod is thus vulnerable to injury unless the tripod is dismantled with care (Doherty 1999b, p. 82).

5. www.roadblock.org.uk (accessed 29 December 2008).

6. www.roadblock.org.uk (accessed 29 December 2008).

7. Referring to climate change as a ‘master frame’ has raised objections from some who consider it merely a ‘bridging frame’, but I think it is legitimate because climate change has become a metanarrative, and because Snow (2004, p. 390) himself does not make a clear distinction between ‘master’ and ‘bridging’ frames, but refers to master frames as ‘bridging’ different concerns of heterogeneous groups.

8. This section is partly adapted from Rootes (2009b).

9. www.ukwin.org.uk.

10. UKWIN's 45 members in August 2009 included FoE and 17 local FoE groups, and of the 33 anti-incinerator campaign groups listed in updates on UKWIN's website in 2009, four were local FoE groups.

11. http://www.airportwatch.org.uk/aboutus.php (22 December 2008).

12. FoE campaigned against Heathrow's terminal 5 in the 1990s, and participated prominently in Stop Climate Chaos from 2005, but analysis of FoE campaigns and press releases suggests that climate change was not a salient campaign priority before 2005 (Price 2012). By 2009, however, climate change accounted for 50% of the expenditure of FoE Trust (FoE EWNI Annual Review 2009–2010), http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/reports/annual_review_0910.pdf (accessed 15 January 2013).

13. On Climate Camp, see Saunders and Price (2009), Schlembach et al. (2012), Saunders (2012). Centrally involved in bringing Climate Camp to Heathrow was Plane Stupid, set up in 2005 at the instigation of John Stewart, a key figure in the networking of anti-roads protests in the 1990s and in AirportWatch and HACAN Clearskies (Stewart 2010, pp. 26–27). Stewart, who envisaged Plane Stupid's early recourse to direct action as remedying a weakness of the anti-roads campaign, attributes the idea of Climate Camp to activists of the 1990s anti-roads protests who aspired to surmount the fragmentation of ‘the environmental direct action movement’.

14. www.planestupid.com/actions (accessed 11 June 2011).

15. In January 2013, AirportWatch on its ‘Campaign Community’ webpage listed active anti-expansion campaign groups at 13 airports in England, with ‘currently inactive’ groups at another five. http://www.airportwatch.org.uk/?page_id=182 (accessed 15 January 2013).

16. The ‘scale shift’ from local to translocal involved all four of the ‘mechanisms’ identified by Boudet (2011) – brokerage, relational diffusion, frame bridging and certification – but they were not equally important in all cases: certification, provided by research on climate impacts, was unimportant in the case of roads and largely ineffective in that of waste incineration.

17. This is not a criticism of environmental NGOs. Confronted with organisational dilemmas presented by limited resources and alternative strategies (Diani and Donati 1999), and informed by their own science-guided perceptions of competing claims on their attention, it is inevitable that national organisations should often disappoint local campaigners (Rootes 2007b, pp. 735–736).

18. Greenpeace's most innovative intervention was Airplot, in which Greenpeace bought a plot of land within the proposed perimeter of the expanded Heathrow and invited supporters (‘Airplotters’) to sign up as ‘beneficial owners’ alongside the four registered owners (Greenpeace UK, actors Alistair McGowan and Emma Thompson, and Conservative party candidate – now MP – Zac Goldsmith). In 2010 the legal Deed of Trust contained the names of 91,317 plot owners (Greenpeace Impact Report 2010, http:////www.greenpeace.org.uk/media/reports/greenpeace-impact-report-2010 (accessed 15 January 2013).